Alpine, Arizona

At eight thousand and fifty feet, Alpine is one of the highest communities in Arizona. The valley where it sits is called Bush Valley after a homesteader named Anderson Bush, who built a log trading post here in eighteen seventy-six, the first permanent non-Native structure in the area. Mormon settlers William Maxwell and Fred Hamblin bought the land in eighteen seventy-nine and named it Alpine for its lofty elevation.

The surrounding Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest and the nearby Blue Range Primitive Area make this one of the most remote stretches of highway in the Southwest. The San Francisco River rises in the meadows just west of town. Archaeological sites in the surrounding canyons trace Mogollon culture back more than a thousand years. Alpine today has fewer than five hundred residents and sits at the highest point on US One Ninety-One, the road that descends from here toward the Gila Valley and the copper mines of Morenci.